The last decades have given visibility to forms of sexual orientation that do not have to marry perfectly with heterosexuality and they have allowed others that were already known, such as homosexuality, to become more socially normalized. In any case, some sexual options, such as pansexuality, remain largely unknown.
However, it often seems that this openness to different sensitivities and experiences related to sexuality remains insufficient, because The possibility that certain people do not feel sexual desires is not usually contemplated
What happens when we talk not about different sexual orientations, but about cases in which there is no sexual orientation at all? When we refer to this we are talking about a phenomenon that has received the name of asexuality .
Neither ideology nor sexual orientation
An asexual person is, quite simply, a person who does not experience sexual desire or attraction and therefore does not feel moved to have sexual relations of any kind. Asexuality, in short, is the persistent lack of sexual desire that is not motivated or fueled by habits with religious or cultural roots. He celibacy moved by religious reasons, therefore, is something else.
Asexuality cannot be considered a form of sexual orientation, because it consists precisely in the absence of a preference of this type, but it is not an ideology that leads to sexual repression in a more or less conscious way. However, that does not mean that there are no groups of asexual people who have associated for political purposes, as has happened with LGBT groups.
Currently, it is normal for men and women who identify as asexual to demand the need to build a world in which sexual desire is not something that is presupposed and in which it is not mandatory to have sex to receive social approval. For this purpose there are communities like AVEN (Asexual Visibility and Education Network) who are responsible for giving a voice to these people and disseminating knowledge and experiences about asexuality. AVEN, by the way, has more than ten thousand registered.
Missing data!
Although asexual people tend to want to make themselves visible by joining efforts collectively, asexuality itself is a phenomenon about which very little is known There is very little research that addresses it directly or indirectly.
In fact, most studies are limited to being based on surveys, such as the one that gave rise to an article published in the Journal of Sex Research in which it is stated that around 1% of Brits could be asexual Given the lack of information, there is no well-established theory that explains the bases of asexuality, why it occurs, and what type of people are more likely to be asexual.
And there is also a lack of sensitivity
Part of the way this lack of information about asexuality is approached, more than scientific, is profoundly ideological For example, it is not unusual to talk about asexuality as if it did not exist and was a fiction fed by repressed people.
It is also frequently taken as a disease symptom although there is no evidence to support such a point of view, and there is an attempt to stigmatize in some way people who do not experience sexuality like the rest (something that has also historically happened with all LGBT groups).
Other currents of opinion tend to exaggerate the characteristics by which asexual people are different from the rest, as if they were practically a separate civilization with very specific and stereotyped ways of living life and relating to others. Asexuals, however, They tend to put emphasis not on differences but on everything that characterizes them as humans They claim to be people fully capable of interacting normally with everyone and having intimate relationships, although not necessarily sexual. It is easy to imagine why they are right: after all, believing that the simple fact of not feeling sexual desire means being socially isolated or has to be irremediably caused by an illness is a good example of why groups like AVEN have a lot work to do.
What is clear is that There is nothing wrong with not experiencing sexual desire in itself and there is no reason to try to fight against asexuality as if it were a disease. In any case, it is society as a whole that must fight to make room for all sensitivities.
